88 - Two Sponsors

Hesper Vane read the sponsorship form twice, which she does with everything, and then took the cap off her pen and signed it without asking him a single question.

"You have not read the second page," Kalen said.

"I have read the second page about four hundred times."

It is the same second page as an endorsement and she signed one of those for him in the summer, twenty-five marks, on credit, at her own rate, and told him to his face that it would fail. She blotted the ink with the side of her hand.

"You should know that this is not the same operation."

"So that we have it, I know it is not the same operation."

"Then say it, so that neither of us is being delicate about it."

He said it. An endorsement says a petition is worth hearing. A sponsorship says the man is worth the grade, and the sponsor's own standing answers for it, and if he is wrong in a room in four years she is wrong in that room with him.

"Taking it in order, that part is fine," Hesper said. "I have been wrong in rooms."

"Then it is the other part."

"It is the other part."

She put the pen down and squared the form to the edge of the desk, and told him the shape of it in about eleven sentences, in the register of a clerk confirming an appointment, which is the register she says everything in.

She is a Freehand of the collection service. He is a debtor of hers. She has sat on that folding stool one evening a week for the better part of a year and taken money off him and written him a receipt, in that office, with the door open, and there is a word in her guild for a woman who then puts her name to the standing of the man she collects from. The word is not fraud, because it is not fraud. It is not misconduct, because it is not misconduct.

"So that you have it from me, there is no rule against it," she said. "There has never needed to be one."

"Which is worse."

"Which is worse. A rule you can answer. There is nothing here to answer."

It will go round the service in about nine days. Nobody will say a word to her.

In the spring she will find that the ward rotations have been adjusted and that she has got Ward Eleven and the slag end of Six. That is eleven miles of walking a day against four. It is about a third of the fees. The man who does it will be sorry about it and will not be lying, and he will not have been told to do it by anybody, because nobody in that service has ever had to be told anything.

Kalen has watched her go up a stair with a lamp and a file and come down again with eleven marks and a receipt, fifty times, in that yard. He knows exactly what a rotation is worth to her, because he is the arithmetic on the bottom of it, and she has never once let him pretend otherwise.

"You knew all of that before you took the cap off the pen," Kalen said.

"I have known it since the summer. I have been waiting for you to come and ask." She put the form in the ordinary compartment of the satchel, in front of him, and did not turn away to do it. "You took eleven weeks, which is about eight longer than I allowed for, and I have made a good deal of money off you in the interval."

He had a sentence ready. He had been carrying it up the road from the counter and had got about two words into it.

"No," Hesper said.

"You do not know what it was."

"I know exactly what it was. If you say it out loud it becomes a thing you owe me, and you have got enough of those." She stood up and folded the stool and put it against the wall in the place it lives. "Taking it in order, thirteen marks on Tuesday."

"I have got thirteen marks on Tuesday."

"You have got thirteen marks this Tuesday," she said, and went out through the yard.

* * *

The second name was the difficulty and he spent the whole of the Wednesday on it, and got nowhere, in a way that was extremely instructive.

Ward Nine holds three Warranted against nine thousand on the roll.

Ilve Karrow is one. He is the Assessor. He is Sedge. He is thorough and correct and has never once been wrong on a fact, and he sponsored a Bonded hand to Freehand in the summer on terms that own two years of that hand's labour.

Kalen sat in the anteroom for an hour on the Wednesday morning working out how to ask him.

It is a good room kept badly, because the man in it inherited the furniture and has not got an opinion about furniture. There is a stove nobody lights. There is a chair nobody uses. Kalen has sat in that anteroom for three days running once and has been in and out of it eleven times since, and the clerk at the inner door has stopped asking him his business.

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The ward seal is in its case on that wall and he did not look at it, which is its own kind of looking. He went over it eight or nine times and got to the same place every time, which was that Karrow would sign it. He would read it at the same speed all the way through, including the lines that did not matter, and he would not go faster at the end, and then he would sign it, because it was correct.

And a man who is sponsored twice by the same hand has not been let out of that hand. He has been let further into it.

Kalen got up at the end of the hour and went out without giving his name to the clerk.

Reva Corse is a Reclaimer of Ward Four and Warranted these nine years, and she is out of ward, and a sponsorship wants two of the ward the grade is entered in. He wrote to her anyway on the Wednesday afternoon, because it cost him a sheet and a runner, and because he wanted it to reach her before she read it somewhere.

Aro Belk is a mason and a good one and is not Warranted and never will be. He gave Kalen a cup of tea about it and said, without being asked, that he would have signed and that it would not have been worth the paper.

That is three doors and one of them was never open.

Nine thousand and some on the roll. Three names on it that the Accord will let stand for another man's conduct, and one of them is the office, and one of them is the house he works for, and the third is a rope maker at the far end who has laid eyes on him twice.

That is not a shortage of good people. Ward Nine is full of good people. It is a shortage of a particular kind of paper, in a ward that has been assessed a quarter over standard for two hundred and seventeen years, which is exactly the amount of money that buys a man out of a trade and into a grade.

The third Warranted in Ward Nine keeps a rope house at the far end and is called Ravell. Kalen had spoken to him twice in his life, both times about chain. He went down at the sixth bell on the Wednesday and asked him standing up in a rope house with the light going.

Ravell heard the whole of it out and did not interrupt, which is more than most men would have done.

"No," he said.

"Say why. I will not ask twice."

"Because I do not know you."

He said it without any edge on it at all, and then said the rest of it while he went on coiling, because a man in a rope house does not stop for a conversation. He knows the work. He knows what happened at the schoolhouse. He has a nephew on Fetter Street who has water in the morning on account of a pump that somebody moved onto the ward.

That is not knowing a man.

"A sponsorship is my standing on your conduct for the rest of your life," Ravell said, "and I am not putting it on a thing I have heard about."

Kalen thought about that on the walk back and could not get a hole into it anywhere.

It is the correct answer. It is the answer he would want a Warranted of his ward to give. It is what the grade is supposed to mean, and the whole difficulty with it is that a man who has done the work in front of nine thousand people can still be a rumour to the three who count.

* * *

He went into the house office at the ninth bell on the Wednesday night with the whole of it worked out.

Sabra was at the desk with the lamp turned down to nothing and the second column open, and she did not close it.

"Sabra."

"Sit down."

"I have got a thing to ask you and I would rather do it standing."

"Sit down," Sabra said, in exactly the same voice, and he sat down.

She took a sheet out from under the ledger and pushed it across the desk with one finger.

It was the sponsorship form. It was signed. The ink was three days old.

Kalen looked at it for a while.

"You signed it on the Sunday," he said.

"I signed it on the Sunday."

"I filed the petition on the Monday."

"You filed the petition on the Monday," said Sabra. "Nineteen years I have run this house." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "I know what a man is doing when he walks past my office four times and does not come in." She got the pipe going. "I was not having you in that doorway making a speech at me."

He put both hands flat on the desk.

"Why," he said.

"There is a fee."

"Sabra."

"Two a month against the escrow," she said. "Off in the spring. You will pay it and it will be entered." She took the pipe out. "Ask the other one."

"Why now. You would not endorse a petition in the summer and you gave me the best argued hour of my life about it, and you were right, and I have had six months to work out how right you were."

Sabra Quill sat back in her chair.

"Because I said one day somebody might come," she said, "and you are the only one who did."

Kalen did not say anything at all.

She let it stand about four seconds, which for her is a long time. Then she reached across, turned the form round to face him, and put her finger on the line where the second name goes.

"Counter stamp before the eighth bell tomorrow," she said. "Take it up yourself." Sabra let that sit. "Do not send the boy."

"Sabra."

"Do not," said Sabra, and got the pipe going again, which was the end of that.

* * *

He took it up himself in the morning in a coat with brick dust in it and stood in a queue of two behind a woman transferring a tenement title.

The Warrant counter is at the top of the ward office stair and it has a brass rail across the front of it, worn bright in three places. That is how you know how many people come to that counter and where they put their hands. It is not a busy counter. Ward Nine enters a Warrant about once in four years.

The clerk read both sponsorships and checked both hands against the roll, and did it slowly, and Kalen let him. A man who checks a thing slowly at a counter is a man who is going to check it once.

"Vane, Hesper. Freehand of the collection service."

"Yes."

"Quill, Sabra. Warranted, master of the reclamation house." The clerk looked up. "That is one at the grade. It is enough."

He stamped it and turned the sheet over.

"Hearing on Saturday. The ward hall, the second bell. It runs ninety minutes and it will not run a minute longer, because the room is let after."

"Who sits on it?"

"Three."

The clerk ran his pen down the printed side and read them off it. The Assessor of the ward. A Warranted of the ward not being a sponsor. And the chair, which is the Chartered seat of the ward, and which is not a choice anybody makes, because it is the schedule.

Kalen stood at the counter with his hand on the worn brass.

"Ward Nine has not got a Chartered seat," he said.

"Ward Nine has got a Chartered seat. It has had one since sixty-four."

"Nobody in this ward has ever mentioned it."

"Nobody in this ward has ever needed it."

He said it without any weight on it at all, the way a man says a thing he has said four hundred times to people transferring tenement titles. Then he turned the sheet round and pushed it across so that Kalen could read the box himself, which was a kindness and was also the fastest way to get him away from the counter.

He read the box.

Then he read the second line of it, where they enter the name of the person who will actually sit, because a seat is a seat and a man is a man. He had known what it was going to say from the top of the stairs and had gone on reading anyway, the way you do.

He came down into the hall and out through the doors, and there were two men coming up the steps with a document case between them.

The one in front was thirty and pleasant and had good paper under his arm.

"Mr Ashgrove," said Hallam Reeve. "You are early. I am not. I am here about a drain."

Behind him Tam did not look up from the file.